calibrated-backprojection-network VS manydepth

Our work "Unsupervised Depth Completion with Calibrated Backprojection Layers" has been accepted as an oral paper at ICCV 2021! We will be giving our talk during Session 10 (10/13 2-3 pm PST / 5-6 pm EST and 10/15 7-8 am PST / 10-11 am EST, https://www.eventscribe.net/2021/ICCV/fsPopup.asp?efp=WlJFS0tHTEMxNTgzMA%20&PosterID=428697%20&rnd=0.4100732&mode=posterinfo). This is joint work with Stefano Soatto at the UCLA Vision Lab.

In a nutshell: we propose a method for point cloud densification (from camera, IMU, range sensor) that can generalize well across different sensor platforms. The figure in this link illustrates our improvement over existing works: https://github.com/alexklwong/calibrated-backprojection-network/blob/master/figures/overview_teaser.gif

The slightly longer version: previous methods, when trained on one sensor platform, have problem generalizing to different ones when deployed to the wild. This is because they are overfitted to the sensors used to collect the training set. Our method takes image, sparse point cloud and camera calibration as input, which allows us to use a different calibration at test time. This significantly improves generalization to novel scenes captured by sensors different than those used during training. Amongst our innovations is a "calibrated backprojection layer" that imposes strong inductive bias on the network (as opposed trying to learn everything from the data). This design allows our method to achieve the state of the art on both indoor and outdoor scenarios while using a smaller model size and boasting a faster inference time.

For those interested, here are the links to

paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.10531.pdf

code (pytorch): https://github.com/alexklwong/calibrated-backprojection-network

Code for https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.10531 found: https://github.com/alexklwong/calibrated-backprojection-network

Yup! This kind of reconstruction is known as multi-view reconstruction. Though the cameras don't need to have a movable mount, they're already on a car which moves! The car moves and gives them a new "perspective" at every frame. That's how some monocular systems already work. Here's an example of one such system: https://github.com/nianticlabs/manydepth

That said, I think what you're referring to is more extreme perspectives that shift in ways the car cannot drive and you are correct that this would aid in reconstruction. This is how NERF models do their 3D reconstruction (https://nerfies.github.io/).

Looks like it's available now.